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Issue
28: Alternatives: Discover the Worlds Beyond Ubuntu

Alternatives: Believe it or not, Ubuntu is not the be-all and endall of Linux distributions. You may think having hundreds, maybe thousands of distros, is overkill, but when someone, often a group of someones, has put time and effort into developing a new distro, you can be pretty sure it’s for a reason. In this issue of Ubuntu User, you may discover some of those reasons yourself.

*buntu distros are great and all, but, if you stick to one flavor and never dip your toes into the really vast and, admittedly, sometimes scary sea of Linux distros, you'll never really know what you're missing.

Most companies producing PCs today claim that a computer becomes outdated after four years of use. Even so, there are computers much older than four years that work just fine when they are outfitted with a lean operating system and suitable software.

BunsenLabs Linux is a community continuation of CrunchBang. Like its predecessor, BunsenLabs is based on the stable version of Debian, in this case, Debian Jessie. It is also appealing thanks to its radically modified Openbox window manager.

GitHub advertises the Atom text editor as a combination of the best features from vi, Emacs, Sublime, and Textmate with none of the inconveniences. GitHub hopes to attract new users with an editor that is nicely integrated with its own VCS.

Launchpad is a great way to get bleeding-edge and niche software for your Ubuntu, but it also provides a complete API, which allows you to write scripts to automate your access. We look into the Python 3 bindings for the Launchpad API.

Linux offers a surprisingly large number of lean web browsers that can substitute resource-hungry options like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Although austere in appearance, these Linux browsers are nonetheless remarkably convenient to use.

The open source DTP software Scribus is back on the stage with a much improved import capability for file formats and many more functions for use in the professional realm. The beta version discussed here promises good things for the future.

You can watch movies, play music and place calls over the Internet with ease with Ubuntu. You just have to load the right software packages onto your computer. We present some of our favorite multimedia apps.